


have you learned what it's like to drown (have you forgotten what it means to breathe)

by olivemartini



Series: All The Lovely Ones Have Scars [26]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Tony's three month stay in afghanistan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 18:59:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15564345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: People are always telling him that he could be something great, if he tried.Stane, Rhodey, his father, and Pepper, always Pepper, telling him to put down the drink and stop with the girls and just try to sleep, to eat, to take care of himself, looking at him with that soft smile of hers when she thinks that he is not able to see, her hands pressed tight to her sides and telling him that he could be something better, if he tried, if he wanted to be, that he is only just playing and maybe it's time that he looks at the world as something other than his personal playground.  She threatens to quit but never really leaves even when she should, because, as she always says, she is waiting for him to become something better, and wants to be standing by his side when it happens.You've done great things, she had said, her voice ringing too loud in the quiet of his great big house, when they watched the news break of his latest technological breakthrough and he had been left with the dull ache of having it not be enough.  Maybe it's time that you do something good.He had tried.He was trying now.It just wasn't enough.





	have you learned what it's like to drown (have you forgotten what it means to breathe)

You do not know the meaning of a life until you are about to lose it.

It's a lesson ( _one of many_ ) that he had been taught in that cave, right from the moment he woke up with a gaping hole in his chest and a hunk of metal pressing down onto his heart, sitting up so fast that he feels the wires between him and cart battery draw taught and suddenly understands what it's like to live life on a leash.  

( _He would learn what it's like to live without air, later, when they ask him to build them their weapons and he says no, but that is the first moment where he starts to learn what it means to suffocate.  Being attached to that thing was like being one of the dogs left out in the yard, choking from the chain around his neck that had grown much too small.  Freedom is one of the things people always take for granted until they have the door locked behind them and have to watch someone bigger than them swallow the key._ )

"You are a dead man walking,"  Yinsen said, and Tony thinks that in another place he would have been kinder, but there is no room for being gentle in a place like this.  In a place like this, you either evolve or you die.

 

 

People are always telling him that he could be something great, if he tried.

Stane, Rhodey, his father, and Pepper, always Pepper, telling him to put down the drink and stop with the girls and just try to sleep, to eat, to take care of himself, looking at him with that soft smile of hers when she thinks that he is not able to see, her hands pressed tight to her sides and telling him that he could be something better, if he tried, if he wanted to be, that he is only just playing and maybe it's time that he looks at the world as something other than his personal playground.  She threatens to quit but never really leaves even when she should, because, as she always says, she is waiting for him to become something better, and wants to be standing by his side when it happens.

 _You've done great things,_ she had said, her voice ringing too loud in the quiet of his great big house, when they watched the news break of his latest technological breakthrough and he had been left with the dull ache of having it not be enough.   _Maybe it's time that you do something good._

He had tried.

He was trying now.

It just might not be enough.

 

 

 

There's a saying that to change your life, you only need ten seconds of bravery.

Tony doesn't know if it was bravery was the word that he would use.  When a man with a lot of guns and a lot more hate looks you in the face, there are really only two answers you can give.  And at the moment, Tony was thinking only of how this was all his fault, that there was a target on his back and people ( _good people, soldiers enamored with a man that they should not bother idolizing, people who died trying to protect him and got killed by his guns_ ) had gotten caught in the crossfire, how Rhodey had been in the car right behind him and he would never get to know if he was alright, that he could not make more blood be spilled at his hands by saying yes.

So he gives the wrong answer with Pepper's voice ringing in his ears, telling him to be safe, to be strong, to take care of himself, to be a man that she could be proud of, and the first time that they shove him under the water he can only think about what she would say, if she can see him now.  Pepper Potts is not the worst image to have floating in front of your eyes when you are about to die.  At least you go out with a  view.

 

 

 

He chokes on his own lungs.

Even when they let him out of the water ( _for the fifth time, he cannot take a sixth_ ) Tony is half convinced that the water is still lurking in his throat, ready to drown him when his guard falls, so he does not let himself take a breath, just coughs and heaves and bows down to the ground, clutching to the side of the tub for support until he can finally take a breath, only he cannot enjoy it for long because there are hands on him, under his arms and behind his shoulders and on the top of his head, pressing him down, down, down into the water and  _no, no, please, no, don't, I'll do it, I'll do it_ but he can't because that would mean good people would die, that American men and women would die at his hands, and even though people have called him the merchant of death all his life ( _a mantle passed down from father to son, his own rust red crown_ ) he had never thought that he deserved the name until now.

They let him go, eventually, when he can't take anymore.  They throw him back into the room with Yinsen and he stumbles to his knees, barely hanging onto the car battery in his hands.  He cares about that when he does not have the energy to have anything else, because nothing else in the world matters at the moment except for making sure that that does not slip through his fingers.  It's amazing, the things the body can endure when you are trying not to die.

"You are a brave man."  Yinsen does not even turn to face him, just keeps his back turned, studying the chess board down on the table that he had carved out of scraps.  Tony wondered how many people he had watched come through here, an endless trail of dead men walking, how many people he had comforted without bothering to get attached.  "Don't worry.  It will all be over soon."

Tony doesn't answer.  He doesn't have the breath to speak.

He wonders, if Pepper were here, if this is what her better man would have looked like, but on the whole, he's glad that she isn't.

 

 

 _This is your legacy, Stark,_ Yinsen says, and he is talking about the weapons but Tony is thinking about other things.

About the drinks.  About blood on the floor that he doesn't clean up but magically disappears the next day.  About money he throws around but it still not making a dent, that old parable about the women who gave everything and so what right did he have to keep all this currency that he did not need and could not spend if he had a hundred lifetimes.  About the girls he runs through and how he does not call them back.  How he cannot remember the last words to his mother, how he never remembered saying I love you to his father, and Tony is pretty good at assigning blame but now even he has to admit that some of it should be on his shoulders.

About creating destruction and calling it peace.  How he spent his life creating better ways to kill and looked at his work with something that felt like pride.  About all the people who told him he was wrong and he just kept insisting he was right, though now he sees that the world did not work the way he thought it did.  About how if he did not go home ( _and he would not be going home, he knows that now_ ) there would be more people with more guns that would use them to attack, not protect.

About Stane.  Rhodey, who might be dead.  

About Pepper.

For the most part, it feels like failure.

 

 

Things become clearer when you have nothing left to lose.

"If you build him the missile,"  Yinsen had said, the two of them blinking in the sandy sunlight, "He will let you go."

Tony had smiled, shook his hand, thanked god for all the interviews that gave him the skills to play pretend.  "No he won't."

"No,"  Yinsen had agreed, just as calm, still smiling, and the words were like the swing of a guillotine coming for his head.  "He won't."

 

 

 

The idea comes to him in pieces.  

If he fails, he's going to get hurt, but people start to fear pain a little less when they are staring down the barrel of a gun.  

And he doesn't think he's going to fail.

He's Tony Stark.

That has to count for something, even now.

 

 

 

 

Yinsen comes alive.

He never doubts him, even though he should.  It's like he was always expecting him to walk out here, taunting him with his wise words about legacies and how important this week was for him, like he had thought this entire time that Tony had a plan up his sleeve and was just waiting for the right time to use it.  Tony had never seen what it looks like when hope is poured into a man that had already given up, but he thinks it would look something like this.

"You have a family?"  He is used to not liking people.  Tony walks through life on his own.  He is not a team player, not someone that makes friends with people that he meets at parties or bumps into on the street.  Not someone who makes friends, period.  If this were his old life, his eyes would have slid right past him, assuming that Tony was the one who was better, like he was some sort of god that made people worship the ground he walked on.  He has come to realize that he was wrong about so many things.  

He does, and asks the same of Tony, and Tony can't even bring himself to answer because he just.  Doesn't.  Know.

Is it a family, what he has?  There isn't any blood ties, not anymore, and even though he never cared much for his father and was always left vaguely disappointed by his mother's fumbling efforts to protect him, the good thing about parents is that they can never leave.  These people that he has stacked around him and made a home out of are not permanent, and yet, he has done the best with what life has given him.

Rhodey.  Pepper.  Happy.  Even Stane, sometimes, on the days that Tony is feeling dangerous and less of an ass than normal.

But does that count as a family, when the only thing that binds you together is work and a sense of the same loneliness that keeps them all up at night?

Tony doesn't know.  So he just shakes his head and hopes that he has the chance to find out.

"Ah.  The man who has everything, but is still left with nothing."  Yinsen bobs his head and turns back to the game, and even with everything that Tony has went through these past few weeks, even with the mounting dread and fear and excitement about what he is meant to do, the words still sting.

 

 

 

He feels like Icarus fleeing the cage.

The metal is hot, even with the protective gear that he had pressed against his skin.  Tony knows that he is not being hurt, only bruised, but each step sends a starburst of pain shooting up his legs and every time one of the guns in his arms fire he can feel the energy rebounding through his arm.  He half thinks that he is breaking his bones every time a bullet leaves the suit, even though he's pretty sure he that wasn't happening.

( _He had done calculations to fend against that possibility, but calculations could be wrong.  He had done them in a torture room, after all, with barely enough light to read.  It would have been easy to miss a zero or a decimal point and then- snap.  Game over_ )

Not that it matters.  He needs to get out.  He needs to find Yinsen.  He needs to make these people pay.

(There's a curious moment when he hears the doors explode and he thinks- those are the first people I have ever killed.  He had built weapons but he had never had to see what they had done, and now here he is, stepping over their burned and blackened bodies with only the intent to add more to the pile, even though he thinks that these faces will haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.  Sometimes, fighting back is the only thing that you have left to do.  Sometimes, giving people the chance to run away is not an option.  There is no room for mercy here.)

 

 

 

 _Don't waste it,_ Yinsen breathes, chest heaving, the blood bubbling, and Tony is only thinking of how this was not the plan, how this is not what he talked about, how he had to get this man back to his family, that he was the one who deserved to walk out of here alive and he did not want more people to die for him, but then there is a hand clutching on his suit and he can hear guns firing from down the hallway and he is just running out of time, there is never enough time to say the things that has to be said, and he was wrong before, this, right here, this man, was the one that was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.   _Don't waste your life._

 

 

He makes promises to himself, out in the desert.

He's not going to waste it.  He'll dedicate his life to his true purpose in life, whatever the hell it was, because it can't be building these weapons.

He would make what happened over here with his weapons right, even if he had to tear the entire company down brick by brick to find out how they had gotten in the wrong hands.

He would stop making weapons at all.

He would say sorry.  He would stop drinking.  He would go to his mother's grave and lay the flowers there himself instead of paying a gardener to do it, stand in front of his father's grave and say sorry even if he cannot hear him.  He'll give Happy a raise just because and tell Rhodey thank you, tell Rhodey sorry, tell him he's the best friend he ever had, if he's alive.  He'll tell Pepper that he never wants her to leave, even if that means that she cannot be his assistant anymore.  Tony will take her anyway he can have her, anything that she is giving.

He'll find a way to live.  To be that better man that everyone was always telling him was lying just beneath the surface.

He just has to make it home first.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on Instagram @olive.writes.fanfic


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